How To Integrate Legacy Apps With the Modern Data Center

As IT organizations embrace new approaches to data center architecture such as converged infrastructure and software-defined data centers, they have to ensure that legacy applications and workloads will be fully supported in their new environments. The goal is to deploy solutions that are engineered for both modern and legacy workloads.

Converged infrastructure solutions provide a path to the next-generation data center by integrating and pooling all of the necessary resources for any particular workload, including the server, storage, network and management platform. These solutions can help to reduce costs and enable accelerated deployment of resources for private clouds, development environments and other critical use cases.

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However, many of the leading converged infrastructure solutions lack the flexibility to work with existing infrastructures and applications and, to make matters worse, many are built on proprietary platforms that limit choice and lock customers into a single-vendor approach. Rather than enabling agility and seamless integration across the infrastructure, they can often create separate silos that stifle agility.

One of the challenges in evolving your infrastructure is to make sure that newly deployed converged solutions enable compatibility and consistency with the applications running on legacy infrastructures. This means working with a vendor that offers an open management platform that is consistent across legacy infrastructure platforms, as well as new converged infrastructure and SDDC platforms. It also means that the management platform should provide seamless integration with the management platforms you may already be using for legacy environments.

Of the vendors in the space, Dell has taken an innovative approach to convergence that offers modern solutions that are compatible with existing infrastructure and applications. Using open and efficient infrastructure, these solutions match technology with business processes to help organizations evolve on their own terms, using new and existing infrastructure in concert with one another.

Of particular note within Dell’s family of converged infrastructure products is the Dell PowerEdge system, which is a new architectural model that provides a modular, scalable approach to infrastructure resource deployment. With PowerEdge, organizations can use scalable and flexible building blocks of compute resources to address any workload requirement, modern or legacy.

Central to the unique value proposition of the Dell PowerEdge system is the support for a range of management tools. These include Dell OpenManage, which is the first enterprise-grade management platform to be made available on any converged infrastructure platform. Other management options include integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 7 and Dell Chassis Management Controller, as well as OpenManage Essentials, an entry-level version of OpenManage.

Importantly, the PowerEdge system architecture enables seamless integration with the most commonly used management consoles—such as VMware vCenter and Microsoft System Center—without compromising management functionality.

The opportunity is to use a management platform in a next-generation converged infrastructure that has a proven track record of success in legacy environments. This also allows IT teams to take advantage of the knowledge they’ve developed in OpenManage and use it to support next-generation solutions. For IT that’s the best of both worlds, old and new.